While microblogging has helped free students from jails, as well as raised money for charity, it has also given a lot of us a good reason to procrastinate. This isn’t Twitter’s fault. We’ll always find nice and shiny things to do instead of work, but there’s a point where we have to say – enough is enough. Let’s get productive while staying an active microblogger in five simple steps:

Batch Processing Your Microblogging

Batch processing is basically collecting everything you have to do (…all the data that needs to be processed) and doing it in a single period of time, grouping similar tasks together to make it easier to go through them. How does this apply to microblogging?

• Set times for active Twittering;
• Instead of microblogging every half an hour for a couple of minutes, give yourself no more than half an hour twice a day;
• Go through your replies and DMs just once a day!

Monitor Trends and Topics of Interest

Track the Trends

Here at Shout’Em we love microblogging. We don’t like it – we love it. That’s why we have several custom Twitter searches setup, the most important being the one that searches, you guessed it, “microblogging”. Setting up a search URL is easy on Twitter, Shout’Em and any other microblogging platform. Some even offer you RSS feeds if you prefer to monitor the trends, for example, from your Netvibes dashboard.

Sync Your Microblogging Profiles with Ping.fm or HelloTXT

The more we use web 2.0 the more social network we’re a part of. The same goes for microblogging. Twitter, Shout’Em networks, Laconica networks,… Two great little services let you sync your updates to almost any microblogging network out there. They’re Ping.fm and HelloTXT.

The added advantage of having such a service is that it limits your browsing capabilities of a particular network – thus letting you actually save time. If you like the idea of synching your accounts, we’ve already written about how to setup Ping.fm as well as how to setup HelloTXT with Shout’Em.

Set Your Schedule and Their Expectations

Set Their Expectations

People expect things. For example, you expect the morning paper or the latest headlines on CNN or Techcrunch. Well, your followers have expectations of you as well. If you tweet every hour on the hour, they’ll get worried when you go on a week long hiatus. No tweets? No problem – unfollow.

Be sure to keep your microblogging schedule consistent, no matter how much you do it. It can be twendy times or two times a day. Be consistent so they know what to expect. You can use Tweetlater or CoTweet to schedule your tweets, saving time with batch processing that we already mentioned.

Close Your Microblogging Applications

Now we’ll try something a little more “extreme”. Close Twitterrific, Twhirl or any other microblogging client you have open – for good. Try going back to the web interface or opening the applications when you need to, not just to browse. If you’re sure you can control yourself, turning off notifications of new statuses could also work. Remember, microblogging applications are tools that we use, not excuses when we’re trying to work.

That’s our list. For more tips on productivity you should visit Web Worker Daily, Zen Habits and Think Simple Now. How do you get things done with Twitter?